It has now been about 6 weeks since I found out my H had an affair where he met a girl twice in a 2 month period for "discreet daytime encounters". He placed an ad on the internet and also chatted and emailed her during a two month period. He ended on his own and I could see signs of guilt - like taking sleeping pills for insomnia, not having sex with me inspite of our healthy sex life, no longer kissing me. Sometime after he ended it, I saw him recomitting himself to me. He has told me so many lies that for awhile I almost "lost it" because I no longer knew what to believe.<P>We met 5 years ago only 3 months after his wife had passed away. He has a 13 year old son and I have an 8 year old daughter. I was divorced for 4 years before I met him. He lied to me and told me his wife had passed away over 1.5 years prior to meeting me because I made a point of never dating anyone who had not been on their own for at least one year. Throughout his whole life he has had difficulty telling the truth, even with his first wife. <P>We are currently going to marriage counselling and I am also seeing another counsellor on my own. He has usually been very loving and a great father to both kids. He is the only father my daughter has ever known. He says he is committed to telling the truth and will never lie or deceive me again and he realized how foolish he was. He only told me the truth about any detail of the affair when his back was against the wall. Even when I had printed email correspondence, he tried to say that it was only internet dirty talk and nothing ever happened. With constant pressure over about a two week period he admitted everything (I think). Until the last week or so all I ever thought about was the fact that he had sex with someone else. We have had a very close relationship and excellent communication throughout our whole marriage. A couple weeks before he posted an ad on internet, we had started to try and have a child between us. He has always been commitment phobic. The c that I am seeing (who is a c he saw after his wife passed away and we have seen together when we were blending as a family) thinks that there was probably nothing wrong with our marriage but that he was afraid of getting too close.<P>The problem is that I often feel that I do not want to spend my life with someone who could be so cruel to me at a time when I totally left myself vulnerable. I have slowed down my career to work partime because he wanted me to be at home more and agreed to stay home if we succeeded in having a child. During this time he chose to have unprotected sex with the type of person who would answer a discreet encounter ad.<P>I keep thinking that it would have been so much easier to have left him in the past when I caught him lying about other things then I would have never had this pain. The months leading up to the affair and during it, I believed that I was in the best marriage there could have been. I am independent, self confident and believe that I should be treated with respect and love. When am I really ready to decide that this marriage should end and I deserve to find someone who is as honest and faithful as I am? Everytime that we are together as a family I feel that I cannot be selfish and need to wait and learn how to deal with this. My H is trying very hard and recently revealed to me that he was a victim of child sex abuse which has left him with low self confidence. My c thinks he needs to deal with this but I have not yet been able to convince him to reveal this to the marriage c.<P>How long do I hang In?

Trueblue,I’m sorry that no one has responded to your post. You actually cover quite a bit on information here. <P>Fisrt check out NSR’s General Welcome at <A HREF="http://www.marriagebuilders.com/forum/Forum29/HTML/000553.html" TARGET=_blank>www.marriagebuilders.com/forum/Forum29/HTML/000553.html</A> <P>Your ultimate question is a very difficult one to answer. How long you stay is something you will have to decide. Before making any of these life altering decisions I would strongly recommend you read the book Torn Asunder by Dave Carder. It will give you a good idea of what you are dealing with, how and why it happens. <P>You may want to try a few posts in General questions or the Recovery group (if you opt to stay with your H) Those boards get more traffic and you will no doubt get more responses.<BR><p>[This message has been edited by oswald (edited February 27, 2001).]